The Sonic Transit of Venus

Breathtaking footage of this rare solar event, is accompanied by a solarsonic soundtrack.

Robert Alexander provides NASA scientists with a novel way to study the solar dynamics by using his musical training to take non-audible data which is then converted into soundscapes.

NASA maintains a fleet of heliophysics spacecraft that observe our star from multiple visual wavelengths and various orbits. Alexander’s technique compresses days of data into a few seconds and then assigns different tones to different emissions.

In the video above, he used data collected during the 2012 Transit of Venus to create this truly stellar audio compilation. A “transit” of Venus occurs when Venus passes directly between the sun and Earth and is an extremely rare event, happening in eight-year pairs more than 100 years apart from each other.